When “Precision” Bombing Really Isn't:
The Evil, the Grotesque and the Official Lies[with 5 intermezzos]by
Marc W. HeroldDissident
VoiceApril 11, 2003Revised Version

"So far, the liberators have
succeeded only in freeing the souls of the Iraqis from their bodies"-- George
Monbiot, The Guardian, April 1, 2003 (1)

"We had a
great day. We killed a lot of people. We dropped a few civilians, but what do
you do? I'm sorry...but the chick was in the way."-- U.S. Marine Sgt. Eric Schrumpf, New
York Times, March 29, 2003 (2)

Since my
previous essay (3), U.S.-U.K. bombing of Iraq has wreaked
widespread carnage, utterly discrediting any notion of careful targeting and
'precision' strikes. Through Friday, March 28th, U.S. bombs and missiles had
killed about 450 Iraqi civilians, injuring at least 1000. Well over 800 Iraqi
civilians died under U.S. projectiles since the start of the war, that is, more
than 50 per day [see Table 1]. In the week since March 28th, U.S.
"precision" projectiles have hit a vegetable market, numerous homes,
markets, a hospital, a trade fair, telephone exchanges, a bus, farms, a grain
silo, a street outside an emptying mosque, the lawn of a women's university, etc.

Through April 1st, 700 cruise Tomahawk missiles had been fired and 8,000
bombs had been dropped. (4)

"It was exhilarating...It was all nice and calm in the city...[but]
once those bombs hit all hell broke loose. I bet we saw 15 SAMs. About three or
four up our way so we had to defend a couple of times. What I felt more than
anything was exhilaration."(5)

U.S. commanders and the pilots say they are taking great pains to limit
casualties in their efforts to overthrow President Saddam Hussein. On the
receiving end, Iraqi officials said over 50 civilians were pulverized by a
blast at a busy marketplace in northwestern Baghdad on Friday.

Wherein
lies the truth? Rageh Omaar of the BBC in Baghdad provides the answer:

"The people of this poor district on the
outskirts of Baghdad have already made up their minds. Hundreds of them have
come back to the scene of the tragedy today [March 29th] to try to make sense
of their plight. They say it was an American cruise missile that caused all
this damage."(6)

Photos provide an answer too - the Reuters photographers Akram Saleh and
Faleh Kheiber have done spectacular work. Many photos from various sources are
collected in the "Shock and Awe" photo gallery. (7)
France's Le Monde headlined an article on April 2nd, 'More and More
Iraqi Civilian Victims.'(8)

The market district of al-Shu'la [Al Sholeh] is populated by poor
Shiites, precisely those whom Washington seeks to 'liberate.' Reports indicate
55-62 innocent civilians were incinerated and another 50 injured.(9) The dead were quickly buried [Photo below]. The Iraq Peace
Team reported,

"The largest carnage of Iraqi civilians yet
since the beginning of U.S. bombings occurred on March 28 at about 6 PM when a
bomb fell on a heavily crowded open air market in the predominantly Shiite
district of Al Sholeh in north Baghdad, a very poor neighborhood. An IPT member
visited the Al Naser Market the following day, observed the bomb site, and
talked with neighbors and witnesses. The main hit was on an asphalted lane
between a row of metal booths and a row of tents. The crater in the asphalt appeared
to be about 1 meter deep and about 3 meters in diameter."(10)

Salama Zaki al-Said ventured from his home on Friday, the Muslim day of
prayer, and was shopping for a TV in the al-Shu'la market. He heard jets
overhead and looked up in the sky. Seconds later, a blast shook the street,
demolishing market stalls, ripping gaping holes in a parked red Volkswagen
sedan. A few feet away, the bombs tore apart the boys of the al-Hamdami family
[Photo shows them in caskets].

March
28th: Raytheon missiles strike at Al Sholeh district

Ikhlas
Faiq, 25, who was treated later at the Al Noor hospital, recalls:

"When
the rocket came, the whole area became dark. For a few minutes I couldn't see a
thing. When I opened my eyes, I saw bodies and parts of bodies everywhere I
looked."(11)

March
28th: The three boys of the Al-Hamdami family.

By late
evening, 52 corpses passed through the al-Noor hospital. Even the
battle-hardened doctors at Noor said this US attack marked a fresh descent into
horror,

"There were limbs torn off, and burns, multiple
shrapnel injuries, head and chest injuries....[doctor Tarif Jamil said] 'I saw
about six children - all dead - and at least three women." (12)

On the
cloudless, star-lit night of Baghdad, the wailing of women emanating from a
poor house was a beacon of grief. Inside, a dozen Iraqi women clad in
full-length, black cloaks sat huddled on the floor, bobbing back and forth and
sending piercing, high-pitched screams into the night of Baghdad. They mourned
the three boys - aged 12, 18 and 12 - of the al-Hamdami family. (13)

Exhilaration
and soul-wrenching grief co-existed as the day of March 28th faded away.

"It
was all nice and calm in the city..."

Earlier on
Friday, two other U.S. "guided" projectiles landed in the Al-Mansour
neighborhood of Baghdad, killing 8 and injuring another 33. Jo Wilding provided
a first-hand account of what she saw on March 29th:(14)

* A U.S. missile hit the middle of Palestine Street
just outside the Omar Al Farouk mosque at about 4:15 PM, just as people were
leaving after prayers. Umar, a student at Rafidain College, fell. He had
fragments of shrapnel about 3cm. Long removed from his liver and abdomen.
Another U.S. missile hit 3 minutes later. Akael Zuhair was standing in front of
his house opposite the mosque. He received 'liberating' shrapnel wounds to his
left shoulder, left chest, right forearm and possibly a piece is lodged in his
brain. No one could guess what the intended U.S. target was.

* On the 28th in the early AM, the El Alawiya
communication tower was bombed and the Al Baya one was hit at 5 PM on the 29th.
The effect of knocking out telephone was to delay patients reaching hospitals
for treatment.

* A grain silo was the apparent target of a U.S.
attack at 9 AM on Thursday, about 35 kms. south of Baghdad on the road to
Wasit. Haitham Abid was driving a lorry when the missile landed close to the
Grain Board building. His lorry crashed and the rear end caught fire. Abid's
right thigh is badly broken.

Jo Wilding
asks,

"Something is wrong. There are too many civilian
casualties, too far from military targets, for all of these to be mistakes.
Either they are hitting civilians on purpose, to whip up fear in the hope of
spurring rebellion, or their weapons are not as precise as they say, in which
case they are not suitable for use in an urban environment. There's no
justification for using any weapons here, but if you cannot hit a military
target without causing civilian casualties, you don't have the right to attack
it."

Intermezzo #2. On Saturday, March 29th, Iraqi television showed
Iraqi fishermen dancing on a downed U.S. Predator spy plane in Lake Habbaniyah.(15) The
$3.2 million contraption had been transformed into a floating dance hall.

On
Saturday, U.S. pilots targeted Baghdad's local telephone system, destroying
telephone exchanges like the Mimoun International Communications center.(16) A target of military significance?

An Agence
France-Presse journalist visited the farming community of Al-Janabiin [Janabiyah]
on the southeastern edge of Baghdad. A night-time U.S. raid had destroyed three
homes, killed 20 civilians [11 children, 7 women and two men].(17)

March
29th. A farm in al-Janabiin after a U.S. 'precision' strike.

A report
describes the scene at Janabiyah, where U.S. 'precision' weapons hit: "Kids
became 'human torches'."(18)

"Bloodied school books and children's shoes lie
amidst animal carcasses on the road leading to the Ismail'a farm in this
village...the main building of this hamlet, accessible via a checkpoint manned
by militiamen, has been leveled, the second burned out and the third partially
destroyed. A neighbor told an AFP journalist that two missiles fired by
coalition warplanes on Saturday night caught five sleeping families on the
farm. The raid left 20 people dead....littered amongst the rubble spread over
the grass were carcasses of four cows, their eye, nose and mouth cavities
blackened by swarms of flies. Two dogs, sheep and chickens lay motionless
nearby. "Five children were turned into human torches in this house
because of the gas cylinders inside," one of the survivors said, wondering
how God spared him while four other family members were wounded. "Their
bodies protected me because I was in a corner."

What might General Vincent Brooks have to say about how his precision
missiles transformed five children into human torches?

Another 6 civilians were killed and six homes destroyed inside Baghdad
in the al-Amin neighborhood in east Baghdad.(19)
The Al-Salehia Telecommunications Center of Baghdad was completely leveled by
U.S. strikes on Sunday, March 30th. The magnitude of the destruction and the
obviously injured persons are captured in the following photo:

That same day, U.S. bombs fell into the industrial neighborhood of
al-Zafaraiya in southern Baghdad, killing another six civilians.

Intermezzo #3. The U.S. Navy has deployed a number of "marine
mammal systems" to hunt down sea mines in the area of Umm Qasr in southern
Iraq. At least two Atlantic bottle-nosed dolphins are [were?] taking part in
Umm Qasr mission - Takoma and Makai. But, to the embarrassment of the Navy,
Takoma went AWOL since the first mine-snooping mission. His handler, a
dispirited Petty Officer Whitaker was seen patting the water, calling for him,
and offering his favorite fish, to no avail.(20)

At 11 AM on Monday, March 31st , a U.S. bomb struck the dirt-poor Shiite
Muslim neighborhood of Rahmaniya in Baghdad. (21)

A pre-dawn U.S. strike targeted the Iraqi Information Ministry, setting
off fires in an adjacent shopping mall named after Saddam Hussein's birthday.(22) Abu Dhabi TV showed live footage of the raging
fire, which it said was in the ministry's press center. A Tomahawk missile had
hit the Ministry building early Saturday morning, gutting one floor and
destroying many satellite dishes on the roof. But, it had also demolished
neighboring dwellings. Next door to the leveled telephone office in Baghdad's
A'azamiah district, hit early Sunday morning, Adel Hussein al-Abdali, 70, told
a crowd of journalists escorted to the site next to the Ministry,

"That Bush is a despicable coward. But we will be
victorious with the help of God."

Dwellings
next to the Information Ministry in Baghdad.

Metal boxes sprouting hundreds of telephone wires dangled precariously from
the telephone building, along with lighting fixtures and office furniture. The
Salhiya telephone was also destroyed by several missiles. Eight hours after the
attack, the structure was still smoldering. The force of the U.S. attack there
shattered the windows of the Saddam Center for Cardiac Surgery across the
street. It damaged the house of Zeinab Fouad. Attacks upon civilian
communications center - as in the Afghan invasion - are part of U.S. war plans.

U.S. bombing also hit a cooking gas cylinder-filling factory in the
southern city of Qurnah on Saturday morning. The factory was located in a
residential area of Qurnah, situated at the confluence of the Tigris and
Euphrates rivers.

On March 31st, U.S. Marines in a Bradley fighting vehicle machine-gunned
to death, 11 Afghan civilians at a U.S. Army check point on Route 9 near Najaf.
The Iraqi family of 17 had left their village, packed into a 1974 Land Rover,
wearing their best clothes for the trip through the American lines "to
look American." At least seven women and children died in the assault on a
vehicle filled with civilians - Bakhat Hassan, 35, said from his hospital bed
that he lost 11 members of his family [two daughters aged 2 and 5, a son aged
3, his parents, two older brothers and their wives, and two nieces aged 12 and
15].(23) His wife, Lamea, 36, who is nine months
pregnant, said she saw her three children die, saying

"I
saw the heads of my two girls come off. ...my girls, I watched their heads come
off their bodies. My son is dead."(24)

"I watched their heads come off their
bodies."

The captain in charge at the checkpoint, blamed his own troops for
ignoring orders to fire a warning shot.

The
grotesque? Listen:

Intermezzo #4. Some 15 vehicles including a minivan and a couple
trucks blocked the road to the bridge in Nasiriya. The vehicles were riddled
with bullet holes. Some had caught fire and turned into piles of black twisted
metal. Others still burned. Mark Franchetti of The Times, counted 12 dead Iraqi civilians. The civilians had
fled over the bridge and run into a group of shell-shocked young American
marines. They fired. Corporal Ryan Dupre later expressed the satisfaction felt
by some of his fellow marines. He said, "The Iraqis are sick people and we
are the chemotherapy. I am starting to hate this country. Wait till I get hold
of a friggin' Iraqi. No, I won't get hold of one. I'll just kill him."(25)

Kim Sengupta or the Independent visited Manaria, a dusty
farming village in Mohammedia district, about 50 kms. south of Baghdad,(26) where a U.S. missile fell on the dusty ground outside of
13-year-old Samar Hussein's home Saturday morning. It left a small crater and
pockmarks of shrapnel damage scattered across the walls of her house and the
family's battered Toyota Cressida. Samar's mother, Hamida, 40, had just told
Samar not to go outside. Wiping her eyes with her black chador, Hamida
recounted,

"She just fell. I could see blood coming from
her stomach. She was gasping, and as I ran to her she was crying, 'Mama,
Mama'....It was so terrible....There were others also hurt, and everyone was
crying and screaming. We had to wait for a car because ours was so badly
damaged. But I knew my Samar would not last until we got to the hospital. And
that is what happened....she died in my arms..."

Hamida's
voice faded away.

In the nearby village of Talkana, Amina al-Nimr, 68, lay on a string bed
outside her home, her left leg and arm heavily bandaged. Kim Sengupta
continues,

"She had been carrying bread back to the house
where three generations of her family live when she was caught by the blast
from an exploding missile. A 50-year old neighbor, Khursa Ali, was killed.
"she was a young woman compared to me, and one of her daughters had just
got married. But she died and I lived," said Mrs. Al-Nimr..."

U.S. projectiles hit a cluster of villages - Manaria, Zambrania and
Talkana - surrounded by fields. They buried 22 people and now care for another
53.

"The dead from [both] villages are buried in
desolate rows of graves, at the Haj Khudair cemetery, a garden of sand and mud.
The newest grave, a mound of gray earth, is that of Samar Hussein. In the rows
behind her are the rest of the dead brought in during the last fortnight,
matching many of the names in the hospital's casualty list. Daoud, the cemetery's
caretaker, was re-arranging some palm fronds covering the graves. "There
have been more people buried here in the last two weeks than in the last two
years. I knew some of them. They were killed by the Americans and the British.
They all had simple ceremonies, because none of these people are rich..."

On the first day of April, another 66 - 81 Iraqi civilians were killed
by American bombs and missiles. The following day, another 40 - 44 civilians
were killed and over 200 injured. On April 3rd, air strikes in Baghdad killed
27 civilians and wounded 193 others.(27) As the
battle for Baghdad looms, the rate of civilian casualties rises - with 100 -
125 being killed just during the first two days of April 2003.

The Massacre at Hillah on April 1st.

U.S.-British cluster bomb assaults upon villages [e.g., Mazarek] around
the city of al-Hillah in Babylon, around lunchtime on Monday, March 31st,
killed another 48-60 civilians and wounded ~ 300 others. (28)
Dozens of homes were destroyed in the U.S. bombing that also killed donkeys and
chickens. Khalid Hallil, 21, in Babylon General Hospital with a torn left thigh
from knee to crotch from shrapnel, was inside his house three miles from the
center of town. His father Hamid explains,

"Metal just came from everywhere. Believe me,
there were no soldiers in the area. Only civilians. There was no reason for
attacking us in our homes. Tell your countrymen what is happening here. Let
them see with their eyes instead of listening to Tony Blair's lying words.
Look, this is reality - not the make-believe world of Bush and Blair."(29)

Hamida Abed lost 15 members of her family when U.S. cluster bombs landed
on her home. Reuters and Associated Press were permitted by Iraqi authorities
to take their cameras into Hillah. The pictures showed babies cut in half and
children with amputation wounds, apparently caused by American shellfire and
cluster bombs. (30) A 21-minute videotape was made, but was
deemed too terrible to show publicly.

April
1st. The Massacre at Hilla near Babylon. An Iraqi man grieves over the body of
his mother.

A bus was hit by tank fire near the city of al-Hillal in Babylon on
April 3rd [photo below]. Basem Hoki, a 38-year old former construction worker,
took a fateful bus ride south from Hillah on March 27th. In Hillah hospital
with a left arm ending in a bloody stump, Hoki was one of only five survivors
among the 35 in the bus. The Hillah hospital surgeon, Dr. Dhiya Sultani, said,
"many of the people on the bus were decapitated."(31)

Nader, 5, and his mother had escaped the U.S. onslaught upon al-Hillah,
which killed dozens of civilians. The next day, Nader went out to play. He
stepped an American cluster bomblet. He was lucky, experiencing 'only' damage
to his right eye.(32)

A U.S. Apache helicopter fired a rocket late Monday at the pickup truck
of the al-Khafaji family in the area of Haidariya near al-Hillah, 80 kms. south
of Baghdad. The family was fleeing the fighting in Nasiriyah. The father, the
sole survivor, Razek al-Kazeem, lost 15 members of his family - his wife, six
children, his father and mother, his three brothers and their wives. (33)

Intermezzo #5. At 33,000 feet, a F/A-18E, Super Hornet pilot hears
only his own breathing -- a complete disconnect between the carnage he creates
on the soil below and his senses. On April 2, 2003, one such flyer, helmet in
hand, with the hose from his oxygen mask draped around his neck like a scarf,
was asked by a fellow pilot on the USS Abraham Lincoln, "hey, how'd it go? You Drop?" The answer,
"Kaboom!" He hears nothing when his bombs explode, rarely even sees
the blast. He lives in the virtual reality of psychic insulation. The men
mostly in their late 20s and early 30s don't talk about killing. Lt. Stan
Wilson 33, a barber's son from Iowa, said "we don't talk about it, don't
worry about it. I don't know how this sounds, but we're more selfish than that.
I worry about my car payments; the other guys worry about their girlfriends and
wives." Kaboom! The pilots rationalized their rain of bombs by hiding
behind the piety of 'precision bombing', seeking consolation by repeating this
is not Dresden or Tokyo. Since only 85 Iraqi civilians died on April 2nd [Table
1], yes, this is not Dresden or Tokyo. Lt. Stephen Doyle, 29, reflected,
"I have faith in the way we're doing things...I don't think that's
deluding myself."

A
child killed in massacre at al-Hillah in funeral shroud.

Robert Fisk reported on his visit to a 'ladies education agricultural
college' on the outskirts of Baghdad on April 1st. (34) A 20
foot crater from a U.S. projectile had disturbed the college lawn. Internal
doors were torn from their hinges, desks overturned, beds thrown across rooms,
but no one was hurt. Fisk found four black and white cows tethered in the
grass, perhaps 10 meters from the crater. The Guardian's Suzanne
Goldenberg reported that on Monday, March 31st, "a poor baklava seller,
pitied by the entire neighborhood, lost his wife, mother, sister, nephew, and two
sons to American bombs."(35) She goes on to
describe the day's happenings:

"[T]ragedy struck in Sueb [a suburb 35 kms. from
the center of Baghdad] when US missiles killed six members of the family of the
lowly baklava seller, Ali Abdul Rasul, and five others living in the same road.
Twelve houses were destroyed in the blast, hastily built one story structures
crumpled into the earth. 'The people living in the area are the very poorest
people. It really is so cruel that we are being hit,' said Taliya Al Mohammed,
whose house, down the road from Mr. Rasul's, was strewn with shattered
glass."

The close
proximity of the houses in Sueb magnifies the impact of America's
"liberating bombs."

At 4 AM on
April 2nd , after the children of Sueb had cried themselves to sleep, the US
missiles destroyed two more homes,

"Leaving Mr. Hathem with few possessions beyond
a kerosene cooker and a TV set. The entire clan felt the loss. ..."when
the missiles came in, everything shook,' said Yas Khudayar, who shared a tunnel
space of barely 2 square meters with a wife and five children. 'We expected to
be dead any minute.' Next door, at Ms. Rah,an's house, the floors were carpeted
with broken glass and chunks of plaster. Overhead fans were plucked from the
ceilings like flowers. 'Just look at what those Americans have done,' she said.
'We hate them now more than ever. What have we done? Why should our children
suffer? Saddam Hussein has not hurt us..."

April
2nd: a U.S. 'precision' bomb hits the International Trade Fair building in
Baghdad, and blast power destroys a maternity hospital across the street.

On the morning of April 2nd, the Basra Sheraton was hit by four heavy
artillery shells. The hotel's only guests were al-Jazeera journalists. (36) At 9:30 AM, U.S. aircraft fired projectiles into a complex
of buildings in Baghdad's al-Mansour district, housing the International Trade
Fair. (37) The Trade Fair was built in 1954 as a symbol of
Iraq's new nationhood and it once housed 1,000 companies from 60 nations. (38) The target was a secret police station across the road from
the hospital. But, the force of the explosions incinerated nearby cars, killed
3-10 civilians and wounded 25, and severely damaged a Red Crescent maternity
hospital on the other side of the street [see photo above]. The hospital was
renowned for providing a reliable service for those who could not afford the
high fees of private clinics. The hospital's facade was destroyed as was its
drug store. A ceiling in the waiting room had collapsed. A doctor said a total
of ten patients and staff were injured at the hospital. (39)
The U.S. missiles obliterated wings of Baghdad's trade fair building which lies
next to a government security office -- that was missed in the bombings. A
foreign correspondent said that five burned-out and twisted cars halted in the
middle of the road, with drivers burned to death inside. A Greek doctor who had
just sat down at 9:45 AM on April 2nd, to talk with doctors at the Red Crescent
hospital, was shaken by four U.S. bombs striking across the street, Dr.
Dimitrius Mognie said,

"We
all fell to the floor, and the glass windows shattered all over us."(40)

Two women in the room were hurt. Dr. Mognie commented upon how Baghdad
hospitals were running out of supplies. Critical surgeries were being carried
out with only very light anesthetics. Antibiotics and tetanus vaccines were
running out.

Bombed:
Baghdad's International Trade Fair.

On Thursday, yet another 'smart' bomb struck a vegetable market at
Nahrawan on the southeastern edge of Baghdad, killing eight civilians and
injuring five more. (41) Information Minister al-Shahhaf reported
on Thursday that 27 civilians had been killed and 193 wounded in the U.S.-U.K.
bombing of Baghdad on Thursday, April 3rd. (42)

On Friday morning, April 4th, the Khalaf family was getting up after a
night of heavy bombardment. A correspondent of Britain's Daily Mirror
recounted,

"And I shall try to write what he and his family
said in exactly the order they said it. I shall try because I hope it will
better convey the bewilderment and horror that broke on one Iraqi household
yesterday...Both sisters [Nadia and Alia]...were still in their nightclothes,
dressing gowns loose around them. They said they had risen late because of all
the shelling overnight. Like everyone else, they were talking about the
electricity being cut off on Thursday night. Nadia was joking about going for a
shower. Alia told her she'd probably be away for three hours... just waiting
for some water. They were laughing. "I didn't hear any sound," Alia
says, "Suddenly a shell or bomb or something came through the room. I fell
to the floor. My mouth was full of dust. I was swallowing dust. Then I looked
at her."

"The missile, something big and unexploded, had
come through her chest and her heart. She was covered in blood, unconscious. I
ran down to the street, Daddy and Mummy behind me, screaming for an ambulance.
There wasn't any. A neighbor said he would drive us here to the hospital.
"We all knew it was too late. But we hoped, we hoped." Her father
Najem Khalaf stood beside her corpse. ... "A shell came down into the room
as she was standing by the dressing-table," Najem says. "My daughter
had just completed her Ph.D in Psychology and was waiting for her first job.
She was born in 1970. She was 33. She was very clever. "Everyone said I
have a fabulous daughter. She spent all her time studying. Her head buried in
books. She didn't have a care about going out enjoying herself. My other
daughter is the same. She has a Master's degree in English and teaches at the
university. Me? I'm just a lorry driver. A simple man." He holds out his
dead daughter's identity card for us to see. His fingers are covered in her
blood..."(43)

April
4th , Najem Khalaf weeps next to his daughter, Nadia, 33, killed by a U.S.
missile [Photo Mike Moore, Mirror]

A litany of lies has spewed forth from U.S. and U.K. officialdom, whose
intent appears to be to capture the headlines regardless of the substance said.(44) The thinking is that the general public remembers
mostly 'headlines', therefore priority must be to monopolize the headlines with
claims [which later get retracted but at no political cost]. The following
chart presents a brief, incomplete listing of such official lies:

Date

Headline
[date]

Truth [date]

March 23

UK forces
take the port of Umm Qasr [March 23rd]

On March
26th, UK forces still fighting in Umm Qasr

March 25

UK
asserts uprising of Shi'a in Basra

No uprising took place

March 26

UK
reports 120 tanks fleeing Basra

Later found three tanks had left
Basra

March 29

UK
claims to have captured an Iraqi general

Retracted a day later saying he
was only an officer

March 28

Blair
announces at news conference with Bush two UK soldiers had been executed

Robert Fisk shows part of US
missile he found with markings that indicate it was produced in Texas by
Raytheon

The biggest official U.S. lie remains the constantly repeated claim -
one endlessly intoned by the solemn US corporate media choir with solos sung by
defense intellectuals - that unprecedented precision bombing is taking place in
Iraq, bombing which largely spares civilians.

The mainstream corporate has, alas, once again blindly accepted Pentagon
claims of 'precise' and 'surgical' bombing. After the first night of U.S.
attacks NBC's Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski says "every
weapon is precision guided - deadly accuracy designed to kill only the targets,
not innocent civilians."(45) The initial
spin about 'deadly accuracy' would later give away to simply ignoring
compelling evidence [from Britain] that the U.S. had bombed and killed many
civilians, e.g., parroting the Pentagon claim of having no knowledge of the
deadly attack on the al-Shu'la market.(46) When
U.S. Marines machine-gun Iraqi civilians at a checkpoint outside of Najaf, most
of the mainstream U.S. media prefers the Pentagon's sanitized version.(47)

In
point of fact, U.S. bombing during Iraq War II has to-date been over three
times as deadly to civilians as that of Iraq War I, notwithstanding the
dramatic use of so-called precision weapons:

Civilians
killed

Tonnage dropped

PGM
share of total bombs

Civ/10,000 tons bombs dropped

Iraq, 1991

3,000

88,000 tons

6
percent

~400

Iraq, 2003, for March 20-April 1

650

4,600 tons

> 90
percent

~ 1,350

Egypt's leading newspaper, Al-Ahram, said in an editorial on
April 2nd, the 'clean war' has become the dirtiest of wars, the bloodiest, the
most destructive. Smart weapons have become deliberately stupid, blindly
killing people in markets and popular neighborhoods. (48) The
Red Cross said that its doctors who visited southern Iraq this week saw
"incredible" levels of civilian casualties.(49)
A Red Cross spokesperson in Baghdad mentioned a truckload of dismembered women
and children in al-Hillah. And as American tanks blasted their way into the
western suburbs of Baghdad on April 5th, they pulverized more homes and a truck
driver witnessed children 'flying in the air.'(50)

American tanks firing...and on the receiving end, Iraqi children flying
in the air.

"It was all nice and calm in the city...[but]
once those bombs hit all hell broke loose."

Marc Heroldis
a professor in the Departments of Economics and Women's Studies at the
Whittemore School of Business & Economics, University of New Hampshire.
Email: mwherold@cisunix.unh.edu.
This article first appeared atCursor.org, posted with author’s
permission.

28.
Detailed accounts may be found in Anton Antonowizc and Mike Moore [from inside
Babylon General Hospital], "Bombs Fall on Babylon," The Mirror [April
3, 2003], and in Robert Fisk, "Wailing Children, the Wounded, the Dead:
Victims of the Day Cluster Bombs Rained Down in Babylon," The Independent
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